Cinema history of the beginning

Cinema history of the beginning

Cinema history of the beginning

Cinema birth of the cinema can be accurately dated by placing it in the famous projection that the brother's Auguste and Louis Lumière made in Paris in March 1895, as happened with many other great inventions in history, that of the cinematograph was the result of a series of technical innovations carried out in parallel by different people and in different places on the planet. In this case, the possibility of capturing and projecting moving images was explored based on photography, presented in society in 1826 by the French scientist Nicéphore Niepce.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and in different areas of the industrial world, various scientists developed still precarious techniques that preluded the invention of the Lumière. Eadweard Muybridge in England, based on the exhibition of sequences of still photographs, and the team from Thomas Edison's laboratory in the United States with the invention of the kinetoscope worked on devices that allowed to present moving images, although they had not yet been able to solve the problem of the projection of those images. The Lumière, who reached the end of the race,  But this is not the place to narrate the marches and countermarches of the invention of the technical devices that made cinema possible: rather, we are interested in summarizing an account of the first decades of cinema from the point of view of filmmaking. history, both of those first steps can contribute from the perspective of a historian and of the still incipient but no less significant ways in which the life of societies began to be exposed through cinema.

The first famous images that the Lumière bequeathed to posterity are complete documents of their time: workers leaving a factory and a train arriving at a station. If the obsessive search for movement is the main objective of the first film cameramen, it is quite logical that the initial glances are fixed on objects that move within a still immobile painting: work, travel, sports, certain daily rituals. At the end of the long century of consolidation of industrial society, the cinema comes to register and project a completely new image of a completely new world. And if we have to wait a few years for us to see, still in an incipient way, the first narrative explorations, in the shorts of the Lumière and other pioneers of the late nineteenth century, we find, however, the substance of that newly created medium whose interest and uses, and the meanings it could have socially, its inventors claimed to be unaware. The whole world has been set in motion; science, technology, culture, and art finally seem ready to move with him.

If we look back, it is interesting to note that the invention of cinema - whatever its future may be - occurred once the world's geographic space was completely explored and delimited by man. The entire planet has been mapped and placed under the direct or indirect control of the most powerful societies of the industrial West; the dynamics of a new historical life have been established and consolidated: the time seems to have come to look inside it and to narrate its movements. The importance that cinema has on the entire culture of the twentieth century is so profound that it would be impossible to imagine it without it. If at the beginning of our century we do not know and cannot clearly foresee the direction of audiovisual culture, given the exponential multiplication of images and screens and the multiform development of the technologies that are inherent to them, a retrospective look at the century xx allows us to consider the cinema as its greatest cultural expression, both because of the massive popular repercussion that characterized it - the most important in mass culture, at least until the diffusion of television, one of its by-products - and because of the influence determinant it had on the construction and establishment of social, geographical and historical imaginaries, not to mention the enormous impact on behaviors, So let's take a look at the first three decades of this history. Our clipping aims to recover certain elements of interest between the first screening in Paris in 1895 and The Iron Horse, the remarkable film by John Ford that narrates and documents the expansion of the railroad to the mythical west of the States - precisely thanks to the cinema. United in 1925. Thirty years pass between one train and another: the three founding decades of cinema and the explorations of its pioneers about its uses, meanings, and possibilities. The plot of almost all classic police films was first told in the cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century. A mixture of assault film and cowboys, early imagery that preludes for more than two decades the scene of the "Wild West" that would make the glories of classic Hollywood, in Porter's famous short film - in which a train is once again capital. there are already the conventional elements of a genre that opposes the law and those who break it and that have money as the engine of the plot. Taking a certain distance from the latter genre, it is interesting to think about the widespread use of weapons in Porter's film and its possible interpretations about the American society of his time, and also consider how early crime and violence, as well as the institutional devices to persecute them, are situated as the center of a paradigmatic cinematographic story of the first years of the history of cinema. The famous final shot of the film –with one of the assailants shooting frontally at the camera– also announces, with a certain playful spirit characteristic of that fairground entertainment that was still looking for its own territory, a connection as rudimentary as it was concrete between the worlds of this and on the other side of the movie screen. the new artists who contributed to the explorations of its uses and the consolidation of the cinema as a popular art of increasing presence and influence in the culture of its time. to find the meaning of an extension of the value of moving images from that brief and significant inaugural milestone into the encounter with a finished film in which the train, the object of that first glance by the filmmakers, has given rise to a historical drama in which subjects, environments, and conflicts are brought together with a degree of human thickness, social complexity and narrative maturity that were still unimaginable for the inventor. Perhaps we can extend the sense of this evident continuity between the railroad and the cinematograph: